Every music lover knows that there are some artists who don’t connect with you, no matter how much you try. But as I’ve learned over time as a critic, you can find inroads to appreciating artists and even whole genres that don’t initially appeal to you—for instance, by investigating their cultural contexts, and trying to open your ears to the ways their core audiences hear them. It’s trickier with an artist beloved by people whose tastes you tend to share, whose music doesn’t stray far from what you already like. These more elusive distastes don’t sustain the same exploratory curiosity, making it more tempting to shrug, “Yeah, it just doesn’t work for me,” while kinda-sorta suspecting that your friends are ultimately kind of, you know,